DevOps Lessons Learned at Spotify

The startup says that the DevOps approach has helped both its developers and its operations team.

by DevX Staff

Apr 19, 2013

According to Spotify's Mattias Jansson, "Many parts of DevOps culture have pervaded Spotify from its early beginnings." For example, "Backend developers deploy their code in production by themselves, with or without an ops engineer to hold their hand. This in turn, more often than not, encourages the dev in question to think seriously about traditionally operations-focused problem areas such as monitoring, logging, packaging, and availability."

Over time, the DevOps approach has helped the IT team learn a number of lessons, and "one of the most important is the value of aligning the goals of Dev and Ops," says Jansson. "Get them to work side-by-side, give them space to learn from each other. By getting the two groups to communicate regularly, the developer will have a chance at understanding the reasons why Ops need to act a blocker at times- and will learn how to plan ahead and produce changes in alignment with the requirements of the Operational environment. Also, once Ops start to see their hardware and the services running on them as malleable datastructures which one can apply code upon, the developer suddenly has a different reach- he/she will be able to affect not just the code as it exists in packages, but will have much more flexibility on how the packages are applied in production."